ProcessWire Weekly #554

Latest core updates: ProcessWire 3.0.243

The latest weekly update from Ryan has a brief summary of what's new in ProcessWire 3.0.243, our latest development version, as well as a quick status update regarding our next stable release.

Prepareing for a new main/master release

First things first: current plan is to get a new stable release out either on, or possibly a little before, the New Year's Day. This, once again, means that our focus is on resolving open issues and updating relevant documentation etc.

If you have a chance to try the dev version and notice any issues with it, please let us know by opening an issue at the processwire-issues repository. As always, any help in testing is very much appreciated, as it helps make our upcoming release as stable as possible.

What's new in the core this week?

While ProcessWire 3.0.243 contains a total of 30 commits compared to 3.0.242, here's what's new or changed since last week:

• Fix for an issue where $config->maxUrlSegments wasn't working properly.
• New $config->longUrlResponse setting for configuring the HTTP code for cases where queried URL is too long (number of characters, segments, or depth.)
• Code optimizations for the PagesExportImport feature.

That's all for our core updates section this week. For more details, be sure to check out the weekly update from Ryan at the ProcessWire support forum. Thanks!

New module: Highlight Recent Logs

Highlight Recent Logs is a small third party module created by Ben Byford. As the name suggests, this module highlights recently changed files in the logs screens in the admin. While you can also sort log files based on how recently they were updated, this module adds a nice extra touch, making recently updated files "pop up".

Log files are colored based on how recently they were last updated, starting from red (updated less than a minute ago) and going through purple and blueish colors (less than an hour, less than a day, less than a week) until finally defaulting to gray.

If you'd like to give this module a try, you can clone or download the module's source code from the Highlight Recent Logs GitHub repository. If you have any questions, be sure to visit the Highlight Recent Logs support forum thread.

Thanks to Ben for developing this module and sharing it with us!

New module: Plates for ProcessWire

Plates for ProcessWire is a brand-new third party module created by Sky Lundy. Though this module is still at an early stage, it looks quite interesting. In a nutshell it integrates the Plates templating engine with ProcessWire, thus adding to the growing collection of templating and output handling solutions readily available for ProcessWire developers.

To quote the Plates website:

Plates is a native PHP template system that’s fast, easy to use and easy to extend. It’s inspired by the excellent Twig template engine and strives to bring modern template language functionality to native PHP templates.

Plates is not a template language — like Twig, Blade, or Latte — but rather a template system. While there are many differences between templating languages and how PHP like they are, they all introduce some amount of special, non-PHP syntax. Plates does not — it's literally 100% vanilla PHP, with no added syntax, or a compilation process.

What Plates does introduce are concepts such as layouts, template inheritance, and template folders, useful for structuring your template files. It also provides built-in escaping helpers, data sharing across template, and much more.

The Plates for ProcessWire module is a lightweight wrapper that instantiates Plates and makes ProcessWire's API variables available in Plates templates. There is one important thing to note here, though: the module doesn't (by design) include the Plates package. It must be installed separately, e.g. via Composer: composer require league/plates.

There's a lot more information available via the Plates for ProcessWire module's GitHub repository and on the Plates website, so be sure to check them out if you'd like to learn more. Thanks to Sky Lundy for creating this module and sharing it with us!

Site of the week: Flückiger Baumaschinen und Nutzfahrzeuge

Our latest site of the week belongs to Flückiger Baumaschinen und Nutzfahrzeuge, a Bern, Switzerland based company specialized in construction machinery, commercial vehicles, and recycling technology. They are sales representatives and service partners for various brands, offer a full-service customer service, and host a marketplace where customers can buy used machines, vehicles, and equipment.

The website of Flückiger was designed and developed by Fruitcake, a digital agency also based in Bern, Switzerland. This site features a very nice and modern design, with some unique visual features, interesting layout choices, quality video and image material, and beautiful typography. It covers the products and services offered by Flückiger, contains an online marketplace, and provides key details about the company.

As for behind the scenes details, the front-end of this site appears to be custom-built, without the help of a full-blown front-end framework. One familiar third party library used on this site is the accessible vanilla JavaScript slider library Tiny Slider. There are no third party ProcessWire modules visible on the front-end of the site, so not much else for us to say here, but be sure to check out the showcase page for the Flückiger website at fruitcake.ch for some additional details.

Our congratulations to both the team behind this site at Fruitcake, and of course to the client — Flückiger Baumaschinen und Nutzfahrzeuge — for their awesome, ProcessWire powered website. Great job from everyone involved in this project!

Stay tuned for our next issue

That's it for the 554th issue of ProcessWire Weekly. We'll be back with more news, updates, and content Saturday, 28th of December. As always, ProcessWire newsletter subscribers will get our updates a few days later.

Thanks for staying with us, once again. Hope you've had a great and productive week, and don't forget to check out the ProcessWire forums for more interesting topics. Until next week, happy hacking with ProcessWire!